Now, the outline we've been working on, I'm going
to put up on the screen for you. You see the
title of our sermon today, Wisdom to Remember.
That's the outline we've been working with. You
can take a snapshot if you want for your own
study, but I want you to do something with me
before we dig in. I want you to close your eyes
for a moment. Humor me, please. Don't fall asleep.
Close your eyes. I promise it won't take long.
As your eyes are closed, picture yourself 20
years from now. 20 years from now, focus on your
hands. Are they steady? Do they tremble when
you try to hold a cup of coffee? Picture your
eyes. Can you still read the fine print? Has
the world gone soft and blurry at the edges?
Picture your strength. The strength you maybe
take for granted right now to climb stairs, to
carry your own groceries, to get up out of a
chair without groaning. Is it still there? Or
has your strength quietly slipped away while
you weren't looking? Now, 20 years isn't far
enough in the future. Picture 30 or 40. Maybe
you need only picture 10. You can open your eyes.
The question I actually want to ask you, the
one underneath all of that imagining of the future,
is this. What would you want to have already
settled with God before you get there? Don't
let go of that question. Because that question,
that's what Ecclesiastes is going to force us
to ask in this final chapter. Solomon, he's the
man who had more wisdom. More wealth, more pleasure,
more accomplishment than perhaps any other human
being in history. And he spent 11 chapters so
far testing every avenue of life. Wisdom, pleasure,
work, legacy, wealth. And over and over again,
he comes back to that haunting refrain. In Hebrew,
habel. In our Bibles, often rendered vanity.
That Hebrew word paints a picture of vapor, a
fleeting mist that you can't hold it in your
hand. And then in chapter 12 here, with the wisdom
of a man who has seen it all and lost a lot of
it, he turns to the young and honestly, really
to all of us, because here's the thing, no matter
your age, you're younger today than you will
be tomorrow. And he says this, don't wait. Don't
wait until your body has already betrayed you
to figure out what matters. Settle it now. So
before we go any further, I want us to hear the
whole of God's word together, not in pieces,
but one continuous appeal. So would you stand
with me as I read from Ecclesiastes chapter 12?
And forgive me if I hold my Bible too close and
muffle my microphone on account of my eyes. Beginning
in verse 1, remember also your creator in the
days of your youth, before the evil days happen
and the years draw near in which you'll say,
I have no delight in them. Before the sun and
the light, the moon and the stars are darkened
and clouds return after the rain. And the day
that the watchmen of the house tremble and valiant
men bend down and grinding ones stand idle because
they're few and those who look through windows
grow dark. The doors on the street are shut as
the sound of the grinding mill is low, and one
will arise at the sound of the bird, and all
the daughters of song will sing softly. Furthermore,
men are afraid of a high place and of terrors
on the road. The almond tree blooms, the grasshopper
drags itself along, and the caperberry is ineffective.
For man goes to his eternal home, but the mourners
go about in the street. Remember him. Before
the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl
is crushed, the pitcher by the spring is broken
and the wheel at the cistern is crushed, then
the dust will return to the earth as it was and
the spirit will return to God who gave it. Vanity
of vanities, says the preacher. All is vanity.
You may be seated. As Grant said earlier, we
want to thank you for standing to honor God's
word because we want that to be the posture of
our heart. When we stand, we recognize God's
word carries weight. We want to listen. We want
to learn. Now, in what you just heard, I want
you to notice something. In the Hebrew, that
entire passage that I read, all of those eight
verses is actually one sentence grammatically.
There's a single command there. It's the very
first word in most of your Bibles. Remember,
zakar. It's given in verse 1 and everything that
follows all the way to verse 8. Every image of
darkening skies, trembling hands, dimming eyes,
snapping cords. All of that is a before clause
hanging off of that one imperative. Solomon isn't
giving us a slideshow of separate pictures to
admire one at a time. He's building an unbroken
wave of urgency. All of it is crashing towards
one appeal. Remember your creator before all
of this comes to pass. So we're going to walk
through this passage together, verse by verse,
image by image, because Solomon is about to paint
one of the most vivid, unflinching pictures of
human aging and death found anywhere in scripture.
By the end of today, I believe we'll discover
that this passage, for all of its bleakness,
actually is not meant to depress us. It's meant
to wake us up. So let's begin reading verses
one and two. Remember your creator, the days
of your youth, before the evil days happen and
the years drawn near in which you say, I have
no delight in them. Before the sun and the light,
the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds
return after the rain. Notice the first word
there in terms of remembrance, creator, not God.
Not just some vague higher power for you to believe
in. Solomon uses a word that reaches all the
way back to Genesis, to our call to worship actually,
right? The one who made you, the one who formed
you, the one who breathed life into you in the
first place. And that matters because Ecclesiastes,
really Solomon has spent 11 chapters exploring
and exposing the emptiness of everything that
we try to put in place of God. Solomon tried
wisdom, habel, vanity. He tried pleasure, habel,
vanity. He tried work and legacy and wealth and
achievement and knowledge, habel, habel, habel,
all of it, vanity. Now he's standing at the end
of that long road and he points us back to the
beginning, the creator, our creator. The one
who made you is the only foundation. strong enough
to build a life on, especially a life that is
going to weaken and a life that will eventually
end. Before we go further, I want you to notice
something else about how this passage is built.
It's going to help you feel the weight of everything
still to come. So in the Hebrew, I mentioned
it. There's one imperative verb, one command.
Remember, right there in verse one. Everything
that follows all the way to verse 7, it's subordinate.
It falls underneath that command. There's a bunch
of before clauses. Remember before the evil days
come. Remember before the sun and the light are
darkened. Remember before the keepers of the
house tremble. Remember before the silver cord
is broken. Structurally, this whole passage deals
with decline and fear and death and dust and
spirit returning to God. It's one long sentence
hanging off of that command. So again, it's not
a bunch of snapshots. It's one continuous, urgent
appeal. Everything we're going to walk through
is going to unpack what it means to obey that
single word, remember. Keep that in mind as we
go. It's going to help you feel this passage
as one breath rather than that slideshow. So
look at the timing of the remembering in the
days of your youth. Now, why youth? Why not wait
until you're older, wiser, more settled? Because
Solomon knows something about the human heart
that we all know too. If we're honest, it's far
easier to remember your creator when your hands
are steady, when your eyes are sharp. It's far
easier then than when your body has begun to
fail you. It's far easier to cultivate a habit
of trusting God like we heard from the testimony
of Polycarp during decades, during the days of
strength, rather than trying to manufacture that
trust for the first time during the final days
of weakness. Think of it like building a house.
You don't wait for the storm to begin pouring
concrete for the foundation. That's foolish.
You pour that foundation on a calm, sunny day
precisely so that it will hold when the storm
eventually comes. Solomon is saying this, pour
your foundation now. Now. Remember your creator
now while you have the strength and clarity to
do it well so that when those evil days come,
and notice he doesn't say if, he says before.
So when the evil days come, you will be anchored.
Then he describes what those evil days will feel
like. The years draw near when you will say,
I have no delight in them. Now there's something
almost tender and honest really about that phrase.
Solomon is not scolding old age. He's not saying
that growing old is shameful or that suffering
is a moral failure. He's simply telling the truth.
There's a season that comes in life when pleasure
becomes harder to access. When the good things
that used to delight you, you know, good company,
good food, good work, they start to lose their
savor. And anyone who's walked with an aging
parent or felt their own body start to slow down
knows exactly what he means. And then verse 2
gives us the first of several extended metaphors
that Solomon's going to use before the sun and
the light, the moon and the stars. are darkened
before the clouds return after the rain. Many
scholars, and I think rightly so, read this as
the dimming of eyesight and the general darkening
of life's vitality when you get older. Now think
about it. The sun, the moon, the stars, these
are the great lights that God has set in the
sky for day four of creation to mark time, to
bring order, to illuminate the world. When Solomon
says they grow dark, he's describing a world
that used to be bright and clear. becoming increasingly
shadowed, blurred, and dim. Then that final image,
the clouds return after the rain. Just when you
think the storm has passed, the sky might clear
up, but then clouds roll back in. That's what
aging can feel like. Recovery becomes harder
and harder. The gray weather that keeps returning
comes back after the last round. before it's
even cleared. And it's really what Solomon's
encouraging us with. He wants you to hear it,
not as a threat, but as an invitation. These
hard days are going to come, so remember your
creator. Not someday, not when you get around
to it, but now. While the body is still bright,
and the sun is still bright in your sky, your
body's still active, the days you still can delight
in, now, Zakar, remember. before the clouds roll
back in. Now Solomon does something wild here
for these next couple of verses. He gets very
specific. You might have been confused reading
it because we don't speak like this today, but
verses 3 and 4 are actually an anatomical poem.
Solomon is describing an aging human body, and
he uses the picture of an old household falling
into disrepair. And that imagery maps almost
perfectly onto the human frame itself. I'll read
it again. And the day that the watchmen of the
house tremble and valiant men bend down and the
grinding ones stand idle because they're few
and those who look through windows grow dark
and the doors in the street are shut as the sound
of the grinding mill is low and one will arise
at the sound of the bird and all the daughters
of song will sing softly. So let's slow down.
Let's take each of those. Image by image, verse
by verse, the watchmen of the house tremble.
Picture an old house with guards or watchmen
that are stationed to protect it. On the human
body, most interpreters will see this as the
hands or the arms, the parts of your body that
once held steady. They gripped tools. They carried
loads. They steadied us when we stumbled. And
now what do they do? They tremble and they shake.
If you've ever watched an elderly loved one try
to lift a spoon to their mouth, try to sign their
name with a pen that won't cooperate, you've
seen this verse fulfilled in real time. The valiant
men bend down. Those strong legs that once were
able to carry weight, they once were able to
stand tall for hours, now they bend and stoop.
The posture that used to be upright and confident
now curves under gravity and time. The grinding
ones stand idle because they're few. This one
is almost humorous in its bluntness. The teeth.
The grinders that chew our food become few in
number. Anyone who has watched a grandparent
struggle with dentures or simply lost teeth over
the decades knows exactly. what Solomon is talking
about. Those who look through windows grow dark.
You know, the eyes, the windows of the house,
the windows of the soul, we sometimes call them,
they grow cloudy, cataract covered, and dim.
What used to be sharp and clear now strains to
make out even familiar faces. The doors on the
street are shut as the sound of the grinding
mill is low. Think about this. The access to
the outside world is diminished because your
activity is diminished. The mill isn't active,
so people walk by. They don't pay attention to
it. They stop checking in. They stop remembering.
The ability to engage with others, it grows quieter
and harder over the years. Older folks might
recognize this next one. One will arise at the
sound of the bird, and all the daughters of song
will sing softly. Those who age often wake at
the slightest sound. The first chirp of a bird
at dawn interrupts the sleep that used to be
deep and undisturbed. Even the joy of music,
the daughters of song, it grows faint, either
because the hearing has dimmed or because the
capacity to sing along, to fully engage in the
joy of it. Friends, I don't think Solomon is
trying to depress us with this list. I think
he's trying to be honest with us. And here's
the thing, in a culture like his and ours, we
desperately want to pretend that this isn't coming.
We live in a world of anti -aging creams and
youth -obsessed marketing and a medical system
that can do extraordinary things. to extend life,
and all of that has a place, but none of it changes
the fundamental trajectory that Solomon is describing
here. The keepers of the house are going to tremble.
The mighty men will bow. The grinders will cease.
The windows will grow dim. I want us to be honest
about how much... more intrinsic our denial is
than even maybe in Solomon's day. He had no cosmetic
surgery. He had no assisted living facilities
tucked quietly off the main road. No algorithms
feeding him a constant stream of anti -aging
content to reassure him that decline was only
optional. And yet here's the thing. Even in his
far more exposed, far less medicated world, he
still had to write this unflinching poem because
the human heart's capacity for denial is ancient,
not modern. We've simply built entire industries
to do our denying for us. Funeral cosmetology
that makes a corpse look as if it might sit up
and speak. Retirement marketing that sells us
decades of golf carts and beach sunsets instead
of ever mentioning the cord that will eventually
snap. Euphemisms like past let us avoid saying
died. Solomon forces the picture on us in these
verses. We've engineered whole systems to keep
the picture at a comfortable distance. So let
me ask you plainly. Where have you outsourced
the work of facing your own mortality to an institution,
a euphemism, or a product, rather than addressing
the reality that Solomon is commanding here,
remembering your creator with open eyes? It's
not a passage about being pessimistic. It's a
passage about being honest, honest enough to
plan. Honest enough to prepare. Honest enough
to remember your creator now, today. Precisely
because you know where you're headed. That was
a strange kind of freedom in that honesty. When
you stop pretending that decline isn't coming,
you stop wasting your strength defending against
the inevitable. And you start investing in what
actually lasts. Solomon is going to continue
here into verse 5. It says, men are afraid of
a high place and of terrors on the road. Think
about that elderly person. They used to climb
ladders without a second thought. They used to
walk city streets confidently at any hour. And
now they hesitate at a single step. Afraid of
falling. Afraid of what might happen on even
a short walk to the mailbox. The fear here isn't
cowardice. It's the appropriate caution of a
body that knows it's fragile, that has felt gravity
turn from friend to enemy. The next one's less
common for us. The almond tree blooms. Now, this
is a beautiful and slightly mysterious image.
Now, the almond tree in that region blooms with
white flowers that from a distance look almost
like snow covering branches. So many see this
as picturing the white hair, the crown of years,
as Proverbs calls it. The blossoming across the
head, the way the flowers cover the almond branches
in early spring. But there's another fascinating
wordplay lurking underneath this image, and I
don't want you to miss it. I'll put it on the
screen for you to see some Hebrew here. There's
a Hebrew word for almond, shakade. Don't correct
me on the pronunciation. It's very similar to
another Hebrew word, shakad. Now, the first one,
ed, means almond. The second one there, ad, is
to watch or to waken. Now, the Lord God uses
that wordplay deliberately in Jeremiah chapter
1, verses 11 and 12, for this exact connection.
Here's what happens. I'm just going to explain
it to you. Yahweh shows Jeremiah a vision, and
he asks Jeremiah what he sees. And Jeremiah responds
that he sees a rod or a branch of an almond tree,
shakad. And God replies, you have seen well,
for I am, did he say I'm an almond? No. He said,
I am watching, watching, shakad, over my word.
Jeremiah sees an almond tree. God says, you're
right. I am watching. So that almond tree, it
blooms the earliest of all the trees every year.
And it was a natural symbol of watchfulness,
paying attention, being alert before anything
else stirs. So even in this small detail, the
almond tree blossoming, the whitening hair of
old age, it's a quiet invitation. to watchfulness.
As the body grows old and the hair turns white
like almond blossoms, we are called to stay awake,
spiritually alert, watching for what God is doing
according to his word rather than drifting into
passive resignation. If I were to give this sermon
a subtitle, it would be this, Aging Bodies, Watchful
Hearts. We continue in verse 5. The grasshopper
drags himself along. What a picture there. You've
seen a grasshopper. Do they drag? They jump,
and they jump high. My kids get scared when they
jump on them. It's designed to leap, to be light
and springy and energetic. And then Solomon says,
this one, not anymore. They can't leap. It's
just dragging itself forward with great effort.
That's what it feels like when the body that
once moved with ease now only moves with labor.
What used to be effortless motion becomes slow,
deliberate dragging from one place to the next.
The caperberry is ineffective. In the ancient
world, a caperberry was something of an appetite.
stimulant, modifier associated with desire to
help things taste better. Solomon says even that
has stopped working. Even the appetites, the
desires that once drove us, they grow dull and
unresponsive. Finally now, Solomon says the quiet
part out loud. The thing all of this imagery
has been building toward. For man goes to his
eternal home. but mourners go about in the street.
All of this decline, trembling hands, dimming
eyes, fearful steps, dragging grasshoppers, appetites
gone flat, all of it is heading somewhere toward
what Solomon calls the eternal home. Death. The
mourners walking the streets, the funeral procession,
the grief that follows. every human life eventually.
I want to pause here and say something important.
Solomon isn't being morbid for morbidity's sake.
He's being loving. He's refusing to let us live
in denial about where the road leads, precisely
so that we'll take seriously the command that's
back in verse 1 to remember your creator. Not
remember him someday, once you've figured out
death is real. Remember him now. Well, you can
still feel the fear of a high place. Well, you
know exactly why you feel it, because your body
is proof that you're not permanent, that you're
heading toward that eternal home. The only question
that matters is whether you'll arrive there having
already remembered, already trusted, already
settled your life on the one who made you. Solomon
now brings us to the moment of death itself,
and he does it with two of the most beautiful
and haunting images in the entire book, verses
6 and 7. Now here, some of your versions may
say, remember, before verse 6. It might be italicized,
because in the Hebrew, it's not repeated. but
the translators often add it to make sense of
the consistency because it is one long sentence
and it draws us back to that single imperative.
It points us back to the creator and so we hold
the whole thing together. Let me read it here.
Remember him before the silver cord is snapped
and the golden bowl is crushed. The pitcher by
the spring is broken and the wheel of the cistern
is crushed. Then the dust will return to the
earth as it was in the spirit. will return to
God who gave it. I want you to picture with me
an old -fashioned oil lamp. And it's going to
be hanging. So you have a lamp, and it has a
cord that draws up to the ceiling. Silver cord,
gold lamp. Maybe the kind of ornate fixture you
find in a wealthy Victorian home. More likely
in Solomon's day, a wealthy home. Now if that's
hard for you, maybe picture a chandelier. Picture
a chandelier with a silver cord hanging in a
great hall. Now the golden bowl, it's going to
hold the oil that is lit and that silver cord
suspends the whole fixture from above. As long
as that cord is holding, the lamp is going to
burn bright and everyone is going to be experiencing
a room filled with light. But if that cord breaks,
If it snaps, even just one small fray gives way,
that golden bowl is going to come crashing to
the floor. The oil is going to spill, and instantly
the light that filled the room goes dark. Now,
if oil lamps and chandeliers feel like a world
away from your own experience, I have another
analogy for you. A hospital monitor, beeping
steadily hour after hour, Day after day, a rhythm
so constant the family in the room almost stops
hearing it. And then, without warning, that steady
beep flattens into one long tone. You can picture
an old rope bridge. It's been fraying strand
by strand for years, but safe to cross a thousand
times. Until one day... That last fiber gives
way, and the whole thing drops in an instant.
That's the shape of Solomon's image here. Something
structurally sound, something valuable, useful,
precious, holding steady for a lifetime, and
then in an instant, in a moment, gone. That is
Solomon's picture of death. It's not a gradual
dimming this time. It's a sudden severing. All
of that slow decline that we just walked through
in verses three through five, the trembling hands,
the dimming eyes, the dragging grasshopper, all
of that decline happens gradually over years,
over decades even. But death itself, when it
finally comes, it comes suddenly. The cord snaps.
The bowl crashes. The light that filled a life
goes dark in an instant and everyone in the room
feels the sudden absence of what used to shine
there. Solomon layers on a second image here.
The pitcher by the spring is broken and the wheel
at the cistern crushed. I want you to picture
a well, the ones that you maybe saw in the kids'
coloring books, a stone one, with a rope and
a pulley. In the ancient world, the women would
come daily to draw water. We know the story of
Jesus and the woman at the well. That pitcher
is lowered by a rope, is it not? Then to get
it back up, if they had a wheel, they'd crank
the wheel to bring the rope back up, full of
water for the household. This was the daily rhythm
of sustaining life itself, and in some parts
of the world still is. They don't get it out
of the tap. Water is life. And such a mechanism
brings it up from the depths day after day after
day. As Solomon says, in death, the pitcher shatters.
The wheel breaks. The mechanism that sustained
life stops working. No more water comes up from
that well. The rhythm that kept a household alive,
it just simply ceases. These metaphors of death,
they picture the same reality from different
angles. Something that used to function, used
to sustain, used to give light or water or life,
it suddenly stops. That's death. Sudden. Final.
The mechanism of this body simply ceases to work.
And then Solomon gives us in verse 7 one of the
most theologically loaded sentences in the entire
book. Then the dust will return to the earth
as it was and the spirit will return to God who
gave it. Do you hear the echo there? The dust
will return to the earth as it was. Do you remember
our call to worship? Genesis chapter 2, verse
7. Then the Lord God formed man of the dust from
the ground and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life, and so the man became a living
being. We were formed from dust, and to dust
we return. Genesis 3 .19 says almost the exact
same thing to Adam after the fall. Solomon, he's
not inventing a new theology here. He's simply
reminding us of the oldest truth in Scripture
about human nature. and human mortality. The
second half of the verse, I don't want us to
rush past it, says this, the spirit will return
to God who gave it. We've talked about this word
before for spirit in Ecclesiastes, that Hebrew
word ruach. Again, don't correct my pronunciation.
Spirit, breath, the same idea of the breath that
God breathed into Adam's nostrils in Genesis
2 -7. to make him a living being is the very
thing that returns to God when we die. Dust and
spirit. Material and immaterial. Physical and
spiritual. Two parts, one whole. Our bodies came
from dust and returned to dust, but our spirit,
the breath, the life, the very thing that makes
us more than dust, comes from God and returns
to God. This is not annihilation. This is not
the end of the story. The spirit returns to the
one who breathed it into existence in the first
place. And that ought to change entirely how
we hear this whole passage. Solomon has walked
us through eight verses of unflinching decline
and death. Trembling hands, dimming eyes, snapping
cords, shattering pictures. And then right at
the hinge point of this whole passage, he tells
us where the spirit goes. Back to God who gave
it. I want to pause here and point to a New Testament
passage that I think functions almost like a
commentary on this verse. Written by a man who
had read Ecclesiastes his whole life and then
met the risen Christ. If you want, you can turn
to 2 Corinthians 4. I'll also have it on the
screen for you to follow along. 2 Corinthians
4, verses 16 through 18. Therefore, we do not
lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying,
yet our inner man is being renewed day by day
for our momentary light affliction. is working
out for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond
all comparison. While we look not at the things
which are seen, but at the things which are not
seen. For the things which are seen are temporal,
but the things which are not seen are eternal.
Do you hear how directly Paul is describing the
same body Solomon just cataloged for us? The
trembling hands. the dimming eyes, the failing
strength. Paul uses the language of decay to
describe that. He's not contradicting Solomon.
He's standing exactly where Solomon stood, looking
at the same outer man wasting away. But Paul
can say something Solomon didn't have the vocabulary
yet to say. Solomon tells us honestly, without
embellishment, that the spirit returns to God
who gave it. Paul, writing on this side of the
resurrection, tells us why that return is not
merely a going home, but it's going toward an
eternal weight of glory. There's an ache that
Solomon seems to leave unresolved, a spirit departing
and dust returning. And the passage ends with
that vanity of vanities phrase, almost like a
sigh. Paul comes in to fill that with resurrection
hope. It doesn't erase Solomon's honesty about
decay. He simply shows us what lies on the other
side for a specific group of people, for those
whose hope is in Christ. So we hold both texts
together. Solomon gives us an unflinching diagnosis
in the earliest hope. The Spirit returns to God,
not annihilation. Paul gives us a fuller answer
and clarity. That return for those in Christ
is actually glory being prepared even now in
the very midst of that decay. So it means the
entire question of the passage, the weight of
that remember your creator comes down to this.
This is what you need to be mindful of every
single day. Will you know the God to whom your
spirit Will that meeting one day be a reunion
with the one that you've already remembered,
you've already trusted, already walked with through
those trembling and dimming and dragging years?
Because I pray it will not be the first time
that you've ever truly reckoned with him. Solomon
is going to close this section with his popular
phrase that confuses everyone. Vanity of vanities,
says the preacher. All is vanity. LSB uses Habel
as vanity. Some of you have different versions,
but I want you to feel the weight underneath
that word. It's a more vivid picture. Habel is
that vapor, that breath, that mist, that wind,
that soap bubbles. It's the fog that rolls off
your coffee cup on a cold morning and disappears
the moment you try to grab it. I know cold mornings
are a bit of ways away for us. When Solomon says
vanity of vanities, he's not making a moral judgment
that life is meaningless. And he's not talking
about pride. He's describing something fleeting,
something fragile. Here one moment and gone the
next. Vanity in the sense of vapor, not vanity
in the sense of pride. Habel is fleeting. It's
fragile. Here one moment and gone the next. That
is not the same as meaningless. A vapor is real
while it lasts. It's just brief. And I think
that is exactly Solomon's point after walking
us through this portrait of aging and death.
Your life is vanity. Habel, a vapor. But it's
real. It matters. It's just breathtakingly short.
The trembling hands, the dimming eyes, the snapping
cord, all of it is proof that your days are numbered.
You are right now in the process of becoming
a vapor. So what do you do with a life that is
vanity? With a life that is vapor? Well, you
don't waste it chasing more vanity. You don't
waste it chasing more pleasure and more wealth
and more achievement. All the things that Solomon
tested and found equally fleeting in the earlier
chapters. You anchor that vapor life to the one
thing that is not vanity. Your creator. This
is where I want to bring us back. to that first
word, the command from verse one, zakar, remember
your creator. Because remembering him is not
a one -time transaction. It's not a box that
you check off once in your youth and then you
move on from as you age. It's a covenantal remembering,
the kind of remembering that shapes how you live
every single day that you have left, however
many or few those days turn out to be. And here's
something beautiful I want you to carry with
you. That same word, zakar, it's not only describing
what we are to do to remember God, it describes
what God does toward us. If you want, you can
turn in Genesis chapter 8, one quick verse, or
you can just hear it. It's after the flood. It's
covered the earth. Judgment's fallen. No one
in his family, they've been shut up in that ark
for months. On end, surrounded by water, no sign
of when or if it would ever end. In Genesis chapter
8, verse 1 says something very simply. Then God
remembered Noah. Remember, zakar, the same word.
God's remembering wasn't a passive mental note.
It moved him to act, to send the wind, to dry
up the waters. to bring Noah out onto dry ground
into a renewed world. God's remembering restored
and God's remembering rescued. So think about
what that means for us today. Looking at Solomon's
unflinching portrait of trembling hands and dimming
eyes and snap cords, we're commanded to remember
our creator. But our remembering is possible
and is sustained because his remembering came
first and it never fails. Just as God remembered
Noah in the middle of the flood and brought him
into new life, God remembers his people even
when their bodies fail. Even as the vapor of
our days evaporates before our eyes, he remembers
us. So our call to remember him, it's a response.
It's a response and a resting in his remembering
of us. A remembering that never breaks like a
cord, never crashes like a bowl. It endures forever.
So here's where I want to land this morning.
Solomon has given us this hard passage. I keep
listing these items because the next time you
ever read this, I don't want you to be confused
about the imagery. Trembling hands, lost teeth,
dimming eyes, fearful steps, dragging grasshoppers,
snapped cords, and shattered pitchers. He has
not softened a single image. He wants you to
feel exactly what is coming for this body of
yours, no matter how strong or young it feels
today. But he's also given us the encouragement
and the solution. Remember your creator. Remember
him. And that command is not a burden meant to
add anxiety to this sobering picture. Friends,
it's an invitation. It's an invitation to anchor
your brief, vapor -like life to the God whose
covenant faithfulness never evaporates, to the
God who remembered Noah in the flood, to the
God who breathed Ruach into Adam's dust and promises
that that same spirit will return to him safe
at the end of a faithful life. So here's my charge.
Practically, concretely, to remember your creator
now, not when your hands start trembling, not
when your eyesight starts to dim, not when the
doctor gives you news you didn't want to hear.
Now, today, this week, while you still have strength
and clarity to build the habit. So what does
that look like? Start your mornings before anything
else pulls at your attention with a deliberate
act of zakar, remembering. Open the word. Remind
yourself who God is to you. actively remember
his covenant faithfulness before the noise of
your day begins. And then you carry that remembering
with you as a posture, not as a morning ritual.
It's throughout the ordinary moments of life.
You actively return your mind, your thinking
to him. In your car, at your desk, folding laundry,
changing diapers, doing homework. sitting at
the dinner table. Let remembering become the
rhythm underneath every other rhythm of your
life so that by the time your own silver cord
phrase, and it will for every single one of us,
that you will not be scrambling to remember him
for the first time. This is a prayer for those
who trust in the Lord that when the cord snaps,
We'll simply be going home to the one we've been
walking with all along. And next time, in a few
weeks, we're going to finish this book together.
Ecclesiastes 12, verses 9 through 14. And Solomon's
going to step back and give us a verdict on everything
that he's taught throughout this book. It's a
fitting conclusion. I don't want you to miss
it. But for now, I want you to carry this with
us. Our lives are vanity, vapor. A mist, brief
and fleeting, real but passing. But our creator's
faithfulness, it's not vanity. It endures. He
remembered Noah. He breathed into Adam. He can
remember you. Friends, let's posture our hearts
in prayer. Father, you know us better than we
know ourselves. You know these bodies of ours
formed from dust, breathed to life by your own
hand. And we know that we're heading one day
back to dust again. We thank you that even as
our hands may tremble, even when our eyes will
surely dim, you do not change. You do not forget.
As we sang earlier, your faithfulness surely
stands and endures forever. So we ask, teach
us, Lord. Teach us to remember you now. Not as
a duty that we grudgingly perform. But help us
to remember you as the very anchor of our lives,
the one solid thing we can do in a world full
of vanity. And just as you remembered Noah and
brought him through the flood into new life,
remember us. Hold us fast. In youth and in age,
remind us. that our very breath of life comes
from you and one day will return. Help us to
prepare for that day, unashamed, unflinching,
because of your faithfulness. We pray this in
your name.